Video recording units such as Video Cassette Recorders (VCR) and digital hard disk video recorders, are well known and widely used. Video recording units are often used as part of a video recording system. Conventionally, video recording systems consist of a video recorder unit which is connected to a number of cameras (e.g., 8 or 16 cameras). The video recording unit retrieves one or more streams of video data and image data from the cameras and stores the data on hard disks or tapes. There are many uses for video recording systems including video monitoring, surveillance and security.
In recent years, video recording units have been implemented as software resident on standard personal computer platforms. Such software-implemented video recording units typically connect to one or more video cameras directly on an internet protocol (IP)-based network using standard protocols such as hyper-text transport protocol (HTTP). Video data transmitted over the network is normally in a digitized format (e.g., motion JPEG, MPEG-2, MPEG-4).
Software implemented video recording units typically support the play back of recorded video data for review purposes. Such units can optionally playback one or more streams of recorded video data, synchronously.
In a security environment, recorded streams of video data normally contain segments where no activity of interest is present. Therefore, video recording systems generally log event information upon certain activities of interest occurring. Operators of the video recording systems typically use playback controls to fast forward to the segments of video data stream where activity is present, and skip non-eventful segments of the video data stream. The disadvantage of such an approach is that there is often a huge amount of user interaction needed in order to process and review the recorded video data, which is inefficient.